Dr. Kylie Moore-Gilbert is a British-Australian academic who came to global attention following her release in November 2020 from two years of imprisonment by the Iranian regime.
Dr. Moore-Gilbert is a scholar of the Middle East at the University of Melbourne, Australia and has carried out research into contemporary political developments in the Middle East. In September 2018, she was arrested at the Tehran Airport by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as she was leaving Iran, following a 3-week visit for an academic conference. She was subsequently tried and sentenced to ten years in prison for espionage. The Australian government has rejected the charges as “baseless and politically motivated.” Moore-Gilbert spent most of her imprisonment in the infamous Evin Prison, and spent many months in solitary confinement. Iranian authorities repeatedly tried to recruit her as a spy in exchange for her release, a deal which she declined.
In several interviews, Dr. Moore-Gilbert has described the horrors she endured during her imprisonment and the constant interrogations she faced. Moore-Gilbert said in an interview following her release that she was forcibly injected with a tranquilizer and beaten up. She also described her time in solitary confinement as “psychological torture,” which she says was “designed to break you.”
Moore-Gilbert was released by Iran in a prisoner swap on 25 November 2020, in exchange for three Iranian convicted terrorists in Thailand, who had been sentenced in connection with the 2012 Bangkok bomb plot. Since her release, she has continued to raise awareness about Iran’s practice of “hostage diplomacy” and draw attention to the fate of other foreign nationals arbitrarily arrested for purposes of diplomatic leverage, as well as the horrors endured by victims of the Iranian regime. She is also the author of The Uncaged Sky: My 804 Days in an Iranian Prison, where she shared her story.
